SLAVERY was our original sin, just as race remains our unresolved
dilemma. The future of American cities inextricably is bound to the
issue of race and ethnicity. By the year 2000, only 57% of the people
entering the U.S. workforce will be native-born whites. That means that
the economic future of the children of white Americans increasingly will
depend on the talents of nonwhite Americans. If we allow them to fail
because of penny-pinching or timidity about straight talk, the U.S. will
become a second-rate power. If they succeed, America and all Americans
will be enriched. As a nation, we will find common ground together and
move ahead, or each of us will be diminished.

Life in cities is full of more complexity and hope than the media
or politicians will admit, and part of getting beyond color not only is
attacking the sources of inequity, but also refusing to make race an
excuse for failing to pass judgment about self-destructive behavior.
Without a community, there can be no commonly held standards, and
without some commonly held standards, there can be no community. The
question is whether we can build a set of commonly accepted rules in our
cities that enhances individuality and life chances, but also provides
the glue and tolerance to prevent us from going for each other's
throats.

Urban America is not only divided by a line with blacks on one side
and whites on another. Increasingly, it is a mixture of other races,
languages, and religions, as new immigrants arrive in search of economic
promise and freedom from state control. More than 4,500,000 Latinos and
nearly 5,000,000 Asian Pacifics have arrived in the U.S. since 1970. In
New Jersey, school children come from families that speak 120 different
languages at home. In Atlanta, managers of some low-income apartment
complexes that once were virtually all black now need to speak fluent
Spanish. Detroit has absorbed some 200,000 people of Middle Eastern
descent. In San Jose, Calif., the phone book reveals that families with
the Vietnamese surname Nguyen outnumber the Joneses by nearly 50%. In
Houston, one Korean immigrant restaurant owner oversees Hispanic
immigrant employees who prepare Chinese-style food for a predominantly
black clientele.

Even though our future depends on finding common ground, many white
Americans resist relinquishing the sense of entitlement that skin color
has given them throughout our history. They lack any understanding of
the emerging dynamics of one world," even in the U.S., because, to
them, nonwhites always have been "the other." Moreover, people
of different races often don't listen to each other on the subject
of race. It's as if we're all experts, locked into our narrow
views and preferring to be wrong, rather than risk changing them. Black
Americans ask of Asian-Americans, "What's the problem?
You're doing well financially. " Black Americans believe that
Latinos often fail to find common ground with their historic struggle,
and some Hispanics agree, questioning whether the black civil rights
model is the only path to progress. White Americans continue to harbor
absurd stereotypes about all people of color. Black Americans take white
criticism of individual acts as an attempt to stigmatize all black
Americans. We seem to be more interested in defending our racial
territory than recognizing we could be enriched by another race's
perspective.

In politics over the last 25 years, silence or distortion has
shaped the issue of race and urban America. Both political parties have
contributed to the problem. Republicans have played the race card in a
divisive way to get votes--remember Willie Horton --and Democrats have
suffocated discussion of self-destructive behavior among the minority
population in a cloak of silence and denial. The result is that yet
another generation has been lost. We can not afford to wait any longer.
It is time for candor, truth, and action.

Cities in crisis

America's cities are poorer, sicker, less educated, and more
violent than at any time in my lifetime. The physical problems are
obvious: old housing stock, deteriorated schools, aging infrastructure,
a diminished manufacturing base, and a health care system short of
doctors that fails to immunize against measles, much less educate about
AIDS. The jobs have disappeared. The neighborhoods have been gutted. A
genuine depression has hit cities, with unemployment in some areas at
the levels of the 1930s. Yet, just as Americans found solidarity then in
the midst of trauma and just as imaginative leadership moved us through
the darkest days of the Depression, so the physical conditions of our
cities can be altered today. What it takes is collective will, greater
accountability, and sufficient resources.

What is less obvious in urban America is the crisis of meaning.
Without meaning, there can be no hope; without hope, there can be no
struggle; without struggle, there can be no personal betterment. Absence
of meaning derived from overt and subtle attacks from racist quarters
over many years and furthered by an increasing pessimism about the
possibility of justice offers a context for chaos and irresponsibility.
Development of meaning starts from the very beginning of life. Yet, more
than 40% of births in the 20 largest cities of America are to women
living alone. Among black women, out-of-wedlock births are over 65%.
While many single women do heroic jobs in raising kids, there are
millions of others who get caught in a life undertow that drowns both
them and their offspring. Many of these children live in a world without
love and without a father or any other male supportive figure besides
the drug dealer, pimp, or gang leader. They are thrown out on the street
early without any frame of reference except survival. They have no
historical awareness of the civil rights movement, much less of the
power of American democracy. A substitute teacher in New York once told
me about students who read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and wanted to
know why they had been assigned a book about Malcolm Ten. Perhaps the
move will change that.

To say to kids who have no connection to religion, no family
outside a gang, no sense of place outside the territory, no imagination
beyond the cadence of rap or the violence of TV that government is on
their side rings hollow. Their contact with government has not
empowered, but diminished them. To them, government at best is
incompetent--look at the schools, the streets, the welfare
department--and at worst corrupt, with cops and building inspectors on
the take, white-collar criminals who get nothing but a suspended
sentence, and local politicians with gross personal behavior. Replacing
a corrupt white mayor with a corrupt black mayor won't make the
difference.

In such a world, calls to "just say no" to drugs or
"study hard" for 16 years to get an $18,000-a-year job are
laughable. Instead of desires rooted in the values of commitment and
service to the community, as expressed through black churches and
mosques, desires--like commodities--have become rooted in the immediate
gratification of the moment. Television bombards these kids with
messages of conspicuous consumption, and they "want it now."
They become trapped in the quicksands of American materialism. The
market sells images of sex, violence, and drugs, regardless of their
corrosive effects on hard work and caring--values formerly handed down
from an older generation. With no awareness of how to change their world
through political action and no reservoirs of real self-knowledge, these
youngsters are buffeted by the winds of violence and narcissism.

The physical conditions of American cities and the absence of
meaning in more and more lives come together at the barrel of a gun. If
one were to select the one thing that has changed in cities since the
1960s, it would be fear, which covers the streets like a sheet of ice.
Every day, the newspapers tell of another murder. Both the number of
murders and violent crimes has doubled in the 20 largest cities since
1968. Ninety percent of all violence is committed by males, and they are
its predominant victims. Indeed, murder is the highest cause of death
for young black males. In 1968, there were 394,000 security guards in
this country. Today, it's a growth industry, with nearly 700,000
jobs in this sector.

For African-Americans in cities, the violence isn't new. You
don't have to see "Boyz N the Hood" to confirm it--just
visit public housing projects where mothers send their kids to school
dodging bullets; talk with young girls whose rapes go uninvestigated;
listen to elderly residents express their constant fear of violation;
and remember the story of a former drug dealer who once told me he quit
only after he found his partner shot, with his brains oozing onto the
pavement.

What is new is the fear of random violence among whites. No place
in the city seems safe. Walking the streets seems to be a form of
Russian roulette. At the core, it is a fear of young black men. The
movie "Grand Canyon" captures the feeling. It sends the
message that if you're white and you get off the main road into the
wrong territory, you're a target just because you're white.
You're a target for death, not just robbery. Even if you stay on
the main road, you still might be shot for no apparent reason. Guns in
the hands of the unstable, the angry, the resentful are used. As the
black youth in "Grand Canyon" says, "You respect me only
because I have a gun."

Never mind that, in a society insufficiently colorblind, all black
men have to answer for the white fear of violence from a few black men.
Never mind that Asian-Americans fear both black and white Americans, or
that, in Miami or Los Angeles, some of the most feared gangs are Latinos
and Chinese. Never mind that the ultimate racism was whites ignoring the
violence when it wasn't in their neighborhoods, or that black
Americans always have feared certain white neighborhoods.

There are two phenomena here--white fear and the appearance of
black emboldenment. Today, many whites responding to a more violent
reality, heightened by sensational news stories, see young black men
traveling in groups, cruising the city, looking for trouble, and they
are frightened. Many white Americans, whether fairly or unfairly, seem
to be saying of some young black males, "You litter the street and
deface the subway, and no one, black or white, says stop. You cut
school, threaten a teacher, |dis' a social worker, and no one,
white or black, says stop. You snatch a purse, crash a concert, break a
telephone box, and no one, white or black, says stop. You rob a store,
rape a jogger, shoot a tourist, and when they catch you, if they catch
you, you cry racism. And noboby, white or black, says stop."

It makes no difference whether this white rap is the exact and
total reality of our cities. It is what millions of white Americans feel
is true. In a kind of ironic flip of fate, the fear of brutal white
repression felt for decades in the black community and the seething anger it generated now appear to be mirrored in the fear whites have of
random attack from blacks and the growing anger it fuels. The white
disdain grows when a frightened white politician convenes a commission
to investigate the charges of racism, and the anger swells when
well-known black spokespersons fill the evening news with threats and
bombast.

What most politicians want to avoid is the need to confront the
reality that causes the fear. They don't want to put themselves at
risk by speaking candidly about violence to both blacks and whites and
saying the same things to both groups. Essentially, they're
indifferent to the black self-destruction. Violence only hardens their
indifference--not only to the perpetrator, but to all African-Americans.

Physically, more white Americans leave the big city. (From 1970 to
1990, over 4,000,000 moved out.) Psychologically, white Americans put
walls up to the increasingly desperate plight of those, both black and
white, who can't leave--those who are stuck trying to raise kids in
a war zone, holding jobs in a Third World economy, establishing a sense
of community in a desert where there is no water of hope and everyone is
out for themselves.

It's not that there isn't racism. It's alive and
well. It's not that police brutality doesn't exist. It does.
It's not that police departments give residents a feeling of
security. Few do.

When politicians don't talk about the reality that everyone
knows exists, they can not lead us out of our current crisis.
Institutions are no better than the people who run them. Because very
few people of different races make real contact or have real
conversations with each other (when was the last time you had a
conversation about race with a person of a different race?), the white
vigilante groups and black TV spokespersons educate the uneducated about
it. As a result, the divide among races in our cities deepens, with
white Americans more and more unwilling to spend the money to ameliorate the physical conditions or to see why the absence of meaning in the
lives of many urban children threatens the future of their own
offspring.

Yet, even in this atmosphere of disintegration, the power of the
human spirit comes through. Heroic families do overcome the odds,
sometimes working four jobs to send their kids to college. Churches are
peopled by the faithful, who do practice the power of love. Local
neighborhood leaders have turned around a local school, organized a
health clinic, rehabilitated blocks of housing. These islands of courage
and dedication still offer the possibility of local renewal, just as our
system of government offers and makes possible national rebirth.

The future of urban America

The future of urban America will take one of three paths:
abandonment, encirclement, or conversion. Abandonment means recognizing
that, with the billions of investment in the national highway system
which led to suburbia, corporate parks, and the malling of America and
with communications technology advancing so fast that the economic
advantages of urban proximity are being replaced by the computer screen,
the city has outlived its usefulness. Like the small town whose industry
leaves, the city will wither and disappear. Like empires of ancient
days, the self-destruction has reached a point of no return and will
crumble from within, giving way to a new and different form of social
arrangements. "Massive investment in urban America would be
throwing money away, " the argument goes, " and to try to
prevent the decline will be futile."

Encirclement means that people in cities will live in enclaves. The
racial and ethnic walls will climb higher. The class lines will be
manned by ever increasing security forces, and communal life will
disappear. What will replace it are deeper divisions, with politics
amounting to splitting up a shrinking economic pie into ever smaller
ethnic, racial, and religious slices. It will be a kind of Clockwork
Orange society in which the rich will pay for their security; the middle
class will continue to flee as they confront violence; and the poor will
be preyed upon at will or will join the army of violent predators. What
will be lost for everyone will be freedom, civility, and the chance to
build a common future.

Conversion means winning over all segments of urban life to a new
politics of change, empowerment, and common effort. Conversion is as
different from the politics of dependency as it is from the politics of
greed. Its optimism relates to the belief that every person can realize
his or her potential in an atmosphere of nurturing liberty. Its morality
is grounded in the conviction that each of us has an obligation to
another human being simply because that person is another human being.

There will not be "a charismatic leader" here, but many
"leaders of awareness" who champion integrity and humility
over self-promotion and command performances. Answers won't come
from an elite that has determined in advance what the new society will
look like. Instead, the future will be shaped by the voices from inside
the turmoil of urban America, as well as by those who claim to see a
bigger picture. Conversion requires listening to the disaffected as well
as the powerful. Empowerment requires seizing the moment. The core of
conversion begins with a recognition that all of us advance together or
each of us is diminished; that American diversity is not our weakness,
but our strength; that we never will be able to lead the world by
example until we've come to terms with each other and overcome the
blight of racism.

The first concrete step is to bring an end to violence, intervene
early in a child's life, reduce child abuse, establish some rules,
remain unintimidated, and involve the community in its own salvation. As
a young man in dredlocks said at one of my town meetings, "What we
need is for people to care enough about themselves, so that they
won't hurt anybody else." That is the essence of community
policing-getting a community to respect itself enough to cooperate and
support the police so that, together, security is assured. Our schools
no longer can allow the five to 10% of kids who don't want to learn
to destroy the possibility of learning for the 90 to 95% who do. In
addition, we need gun control, draconian punishment for drug kingpins,
mandatory sentences for crimes committed with guns, and reinvestment of
some defense budget savings into city police departments, schools, and
hospitals.

The second step is to bolster families in urban America. That
effort begins with the recognition that the most important year in a
child's life is the first. Fifteen-month houses must be established
for women seven months pregnant who want to live the first year of their
life as a mother in a residential setting. Young fathers would be
encouraged to participate, too. Fifteen-month houses would reduce
parental neglect and violence by teaching teenage mothers how to parent.
By offering a program of cognitive stimulation, they would prepare a
child for a lifetime of learning. These 15-month houses need to be
combined with full funding for Head Start and the WIC (Women with Infant
Children) program, more generous tax treatment of children, one-year
parental leave, tough child support enforcement, and welfare reform that
encourages marriage, work, and assumption of responsibility, instead of
more children they can't afford.

There also is a hard truth here. No institution can replace the
nurturing of a loving family. The most important example in a
child's life is the parent, not celebrities, however virtuous or
talented they may be. You might want to play golf like Nancy Lopez or
play basketball like Michael Jordan or skate like Kristi Yamaguchi or
display the wit of Bill Cosby, but you should want to be like your
parents. In a world where there are few involved fathers, mom has a big
burden. There are no shortcuts here, only life led daily.

Creating employment

The third step is to create employment for those who can work--jobs
that will last in an economy that is growing. It is only through
individual empowerment that we can guarantee long-term economic
expansion. Without growth, scapegoats will be sought and racial tensions
will heighten. Without growth, hopes will languish. How do we get
growth?--through enterprise zones, full funding of jobs corps, and more
investment in low-income housing; by helping to finance small businesses
and providing technical assistance in management. Investment in urban
infrastructure such as ports, roads, and mass transit will become a
source of jobs and training for urban residents at the same time it
builds part of the foundation for private investment. Allowing pension
funds to make some investments in real estate and assessing a very low
capital gains tax on the sale of assets that have generated 500 urban
jobs for 10 years will attract more investment.

However, no targeted program can overcome the drag of a sluggish
national economy. Reducing the deficit, consuming more wisely,
increasing public investment in health and education, and avoiding
protectionism all are essential for long-term growth. Combined with
assuring economic opportunity for all, long-term growth can save U.S.
cities while taking all Americans to the higher economic ground.

Finally, the political process holds the ultimate key. It has
failed to address our urban prospects because politicians feel
accountable mainly to those who vote, and urban America has voted in
declining numbers. So, politicians have ignored them.

The history of American democracy is a history of broadening the
vote. When the Constitution was adopted, the only Americans who had the
vote were white males with property. Then, in the 1830s, it was extended
to white males without property; in the 1860s, to black males; not until
the 1920s, to women; and finally, in the 1950s to 1970s, to people aged
18-21. Yet today, if one-third of the voting-age population in America
woke up on Election Day and wanted to vote, they would not be allowed to
because they are not registered. Again, what is needed here is not so
much charismatic leadership, but day-to-day, truthful leadership,
dedicated to real and lasting change, leadership that has the power
within the community by virtue of its knowing the life of the
spokesperson. That is leadership that can get things done. In the end,
for change to come, decisions have to be made, work has to get done, and
some group of individuals has to accept collective responsibility for
making change happen.

Steven Vincent Benet once said about American diversity: "All
of these you are/and each is partly you/and none of them is false/and
none is wholly true." This is another way of saying out of many,
one. He was describing the U.S. Whether the metaphor is the melting pot or a tossed salad, when you become an American citizen, you profess a
creed. You forswear allegiance to a foreign power and embark on a
journey of development in liberty. For those who came generations ago,
there is a need to reaffirm principles--liberty, equality,
democracy--that always have eluded complete fulfillment. The American
city is where all these ideas and cultures have clashed--sometimes
violently. Nevertheless, all--even those brought here in chattel slavery
and subsequently freed--are not African or Italian or Polish or Irish or
Japanese. They are Americans.

What we lose when racial or ethnic self-consciousness dominates are
tolerance, curiosity, and civility--precisely those qualities we need to
allow us to live side by side in mutual respect. The fundamental
challenge is to understand the suffering of others as well as to share
in their joy. To sacrifice that sensitivity on the altar of racial
chauvinism is to lose our future. We will lose it unless urgency informs
our action, passing the buck stops, scapegoating fails, and excuses
disappear. The American city needs physical rejuvenation, economic
opportunity, and moral direction. Above all, what it needs is the same
thing every small town needs: the willingness to treat another person of
any race with the respect you show for a brother or sister with the
belief that together you'll build a better world than you ever
would have done alone, a better world in which all Americans stand on
common ground.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Society for the Advancement of Education
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.